The Shadow of the Crescent Moon

by Fatima Bhutto

  Samarra finally walked down the driveway and knocked on the screen door of the house on Sher Hakimullah road. She spoke to his mother, but Zainab was too kind to tell the girl that Aman Erum still called home, more often now, to speak to his brothers about his studies and to hear the local news of the town.

  ‘I don’t understand what I have done,’ Samarra said as she sat at the kitchen table across from the old lady. She kept her eyes on the plastic tablecloth as she spoke.

  Samarra was unused to Zainab. It was Inayat she knew from her summer holidays with Ghazan Afridi, but he was on bed rest now. She could not disturb him.

  ‘Did uncle say anything?’ she asked hopefully. Zainab shook her head no. ‘When Aman Erum left, when he was preparing to leave, he told me he was going for us.’ Samarra was embarrassed by the declaration. She remembered the walk down the deserted alleyways behind the mosque that night. She could smell the laundry drip-drying above their heads. ‘Has he . . .’ Samarra didn’t know what to ask Zainab. She tried to hide behind her hands, which she raised to cover her mouth as she spoke. ‘Has he changed his plans?’

  Hayat stood in the corridor outside the kitchen. He had overheard Samarra’s voice and had come to sneak a glance, but Samarra didn’t resemble the woman he remembered as a boy. He remembered watching her from a window by the staircase. Hayat had watched as Samarra sat with Aman Erum outside the house, laughing and pulling his cheek in her thumb and forefinger, teasing him as she towered over him as a gangly teenaged girl. She had always been beautiful. She was something else now – she seemed anxious, afraid. But Hayat could see that Samarra was working hard to hide her anger. He watched her as she picked at the dry skin on her lips and spoke to Zainab.

  Zainab ignored the worry in Samarra’s voice and poured the tea, waving away her concerns. You know how the young are, you know how busy, how far away, how difficult, how many responsibilities. But Samarra was not swayed. Hayat could see it from the corridor.

  ‘I cannot be left again –’ Samarra started then stopped. Zainab waited for Samarra to finish; she could not guess what lay at the end of the sentence as she got up to rummage for some honey to pour into the tea. ‘I cannot be left again without –’

  ‘Without what, bachaya?’

  ‘I cannot . . .’ Samarra’s back swelled with every breath she took.

  Hayat could not bear to hear her say it. Zainab returned with the honey and comforted Samarra by lying, patting her hands – scratched by the open wire of her silver thread – and saying that Aman Erum must have been very busy and not to worry. But when Samarra left the house that day, begging leave from Zainab and bolting out through the front door, Hayat followed her. She had lost weight. Her long hair looked heavy framing her drawn face. Her nails were peeled down to their half-moons. Her lips were bitten and spotted with dry skin and blood. Hayat offered to drive her home on his motorbike.

  Samarra felt strange, sitting behind Aman Erum’s younger brother. He was younger, but even as a child he had been taller than his brother. She had played cricket with him when he was small. She didn’t want him to see her like this, confused, bedraggled. She had never been this person, not even when she was seventeen.

  She shook her head now so that her long hair moved across her back – she refused to wear a helmet although Hayat had one that he never wore, storing it under the seat, and which he’d offered her out of politeness.

  Hayat didn’t say anything till they were driving.

  ‘He calls, you know.’

  Samarra straightened her posture from a side-saddle slump and waited for him to continue. Hayat had almost hoped his words would get lost amongst the sounds of traffic that afternoon. But still he said them. For a brief second Samarra held Hayat’s waist tightly.

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘What he always does: very little. We do the talking mostly. But he still calls.’

  Samarra did not cry, she never cries. She simply nodded and rested her face against Hayat’s back.

  • • •

  From then on they started talking. Hayat would drive Samarra home from university, to friends’ houses, to pick up fruit from the market. He never left her alone. At first, Samarra didn’t tell him what had happened to her. She would not place those seven hours of her life. She wished to leave them behind, to re-time her days so that those hours fell off the clock. But he understood. Hayat understood that the more she wanted to lose those hours, the more they followed her.

  Aman Erum misunderstood how entrenched Samarra had been. He had thought her to be a pivotal character of some sort, but she wasn’t. She had been a shadow courier – telling this person to leave that safe house, visiting a commander’s mother to bring her food and money while her son or husband was in hiding, taking notes on timings to be coded and then decoded. Errands. Samarra had run intelligence errands. She had not been central. She was inconsequential. But Aman Erum drove her deeper into the movement; it was where she sought her protection after those vanished seven hours.

  His brother, Hayat, had been central. Hayat hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t said anything tantalizing to Aman Erum on the phone – that should have been the tip-off. Aman Erum should have pressed him, but he didn’t. He knew Hayat was popular at university, that he quietly attended protests and demonstrations as if he were merely an observer, rather than a participant. He knew where Hayat had learned his loyalties. He forgave no one their trespasses upon Mir Ali.

  Hayat stepped in and took care of Samarra. He comforted her over his brother’s cruel absence and saw how deeply she had absorbed her father’s fury. As they grew closer, Hayat encouraged her to go back to the work she had been doing, back to the men she had couriered for. He spoke to them on her behalf. Samarra could not be doubted. She reported right back to duty and wasted no time in exacting her revenge.

  ‘Ghazan Afridi is never coming back,’ she said to Hayat as she sat behind him on the motorbike one night. ‘They have had him for over seventy thousand unaccounted hours.’ Hayat listened, hoping she had not really counted. ‘Seventy thousand and eighty hours,’ Samarra said, her voice steady. After years of enduring other people’s empty hope – he will return eventually. Won’t he? He must – she finally had her answer confirmed.

  Samarra replaced the men as they fell. She replaced them even when they did not fall. She had become, in the short time that such revolutionary movements allow, being short on time themselves, a leading figure in the battle of Mir Ali.

  Hayat had watched her grow, watched her fear slip away into other rooms. He could not have been more encouraging of her. Eventually, even he took his orders from her. He never struggled against her, never questioned her expanding powers. When she moved their meetings away from the open university grounds, where they had assumed the pose of students picnicking innocently under the shaded sun, to the dark tower of the history department Hayat did not ask why she had brought them to their place.

  He had first held her there, closing her in his arms as she spoke about that seven-hour day. Samarra stood with her back against the door and told Hayat about the man with the ox-blood boots. Without raising her voice an octave, she told him about the hours that passed before the men let themselves out of the room. She spoke in short sentences. She did not cry. But she did not move her back from the door either. She didn’t leave herself unguarded. Hayat gave Samarra her space. Strands of her hair clung to the door with static as she delivered her précis. Hayat listened quietly, but he knew she was holding back. He could feel her retreat, saw her shiver as she mouthed certain words. Hayat was almost certain he saw her shiver. Ox-blood boots. Hayat moved closer to Samarra in the empty classroom in the dark tower.

  It had been their place.

  Their dark tower.

  Hayat had first kissed her in that very building.

  There was no language for it. Hayat had stood before Samarra in the shadows of the dark tower, ne
rvous. There were eyes everywhere in Mir Ali; people watched you even as you slept, as you dreamed. No conversation was safe from listeners who intruded upon every fleeting thought. Hayat could not say what he felt. He only wanted to be near Samarra, to protect her, to smell the jasmines that had once left their perfume lingering on her wrists.

  He said her name, softly. She raised her face to look at him. Samarra tried not to blink. She did not want to stop him, but she was scared. She closed her eyes. Hayat moved closer to her. He couldn’t think clearly. He could only see this stolen moment, robbed from Mir Ali where there was no space for secrets such as these, and Samarra. Samarra with the beauty mark in her eye. He said her name over and over to himself, quietly, until he built the courage to lift her chin to meet his lips.

  Hayat had been so anxious, he had paused three seconds too long, the length of two Samarras, silently repeated. In the delay, Samarra opened her eyes. Hayat bent his head and kissed Samarra’s forehead, then her eyes, both left and right, and when she did not flinch Hayat finally kissed her lips.

  She brought the meetings here eleven months later. To this very room. She had packed the floor with hunchbacks and positioned herself away from the door.

  Hayat deferred to Samarra’s cool judgement more often than he imposed his own. But she had changed in other ways as well. She had hardened. It had happened much too quickly. She became too ambitious. She was no longer, not in any seriously debilitating way, afraid of what might happen to her.

  At times she told herself that her imaginings of what more they were capable of doing to her were far worse than what had actually happened. She had endured only seven hours of them, of their power over her. What was that to a lifetime of fear? If they caught her now, what was the worst they could do? Fourteen hours? Twenty-one?

  (Seventy thousand and eighty hours. She was no longer afraid of her calculations.)

  She bargained with numbers she had no control over. Samarra hid from her memories by driving herself deeper into what they had punished her for. She would never be afraid of them, of the man with the wedding ring, again. Samarra had taken precautions this time. There was no one Samarra loved enough to protect from the consequences of her actions. She had cut those ties and loosened those attachments.

  This made her dangerous.

  Samarra never suspected this was a battle she could not win. It made her reckless.

  • • •

  ‘Samarra,’ Hayat says gently, ‘this will change everything. You know that. You can stop it – you can still change the plan.’ Hayat runs his hands through his hair, holding the soaked Chitrali pakol in his fist.

  She smiles. She’s not listening to him. He lowers his hands. He doesn’t know how to reach her any more.

  ‘You know you will never be able to go home again – are you prepared for that? You’re ready for your life to be taken with the Chief Minister’s?’

  Samarra smiles again. She hasn’t taken her eyes off him.

  ‘What life, Hayat jan?’

  11:06

  19

  He can’t answer. If he tells them, they will execute him.

  People coming from Peshawar spoke of drive-by shootings, of men in parrot-green turbans who rode pillion on motorbikes and sidled up next to the cars of well-known Shia businessmen at red traffic lights and opened fire. They gunned down unknown businessmen too – the shopkeepers, the small-time spice traders and glass merchants – in the smoggy city’s bazaars.

  It had already spread far and wide, this green-turbaned movement, before the Talib gave them international recognition. In the years before the Talib assumed the mountainside the attacks had not been confined to Peshawar. In Karachi there had been the dark years of targeted assassination campaigns against Shia doctors. By the end of a decade, they had murdered almost two hundred of them. Doctors emigrated in large numbers to Canada and Europe from the country’s other urban capitals, unable to practise their professions or their faiths in safety.

  In Quetta they attacked religious processions, killing the faithful in their mosques on their most holy and sorrowful of days. In Multan they planted bombs in the parks and alleyways near people’s homes. They pulled children out of school buses and slit their throats on the roadsides. They murdered men ostensibly to level a millennium-old quarrel over succession, over dynastic rights, armed only with the defensive guilt of those who had usurped a power that was not theirs to take.

  Sikandar is not a religious man. He does not have the mark of prostration on his forehead like many Shias do, marks of devotion from the carved tablets they place on their prayer mats so that their faces are imprinted by the continual soar and surge of their daily orisons. He doesn’t carry too obvious a name, nothing that could betray his family’s following of that correct line of succession. He doesn’t believe in second comings and long-awaited prophets; at the very least he does not think too much about it.

  But he is a Shia. In name and in birth. That is enough.

  Sikandar raises his palms together and bows his head to the gaunt commander.

  ‘Brother, I am just a Muslim. Please let me go.’

  ‘We do not consider infidels members of the tribe.’

  The gaunt Talib grows heartier, less anaemic-looking, as he breathes in the exclusive power of his faith. He grips his gun like a sabre, threatening to bring it down over Sikandar, before barking: ‘If you are not a Shia declare it! Who are you hiding your pride from?’

  Sikandar bows his head deeper. It is heavy with sweat and blood. Mina begins to mumble under her breath. He lets the blood rush to his ears so her mumblings are drowned out. She rocks back and forth gently in her seat. Sikandar hopes she isn’t praying. He hopes there is nothing that can identify them as separate.

  ‘I am not, brother. Please. I am not. I am a Muslim.’

  • • •

  In the silence, while his false confession is being considered, while the Talib exchange aggravated glances with one another, Sikandar offers a silent prayer.

  He begs for release. He begs, as the thrum emanating from Mina grows louder, as he feels her body toughen with each oscillation of her shoulders, for her to remain calm. She is shaking now. She jerks her back off the seat and moans a low, guttural sound. They cannot survive an outburst right now. But it’s God’s timing, isn’t it, for Mina’s shallow calm to leave her just when it is most required. Mina beats her chest, her heart, with her open palm. He knows this moment. Sikandar knows that Mina will begin to speak. Ya Ali, ya Ali, she will mutter, saying the words to remember that she does not suffer alone. She will say them for strength, for solace. Don’t say it, Mina. He squeezes his eyes tight. Please don’t say it.

  The thumping of her hand against her heart is enough. The Talibs can identify heresy through a palm. She groans the words. Sikandar hopes no one can understand them but him. She will get them killed. Mina has never hidden her faith, never lied for protection or for the comforts of assimilation.

  The gaunt Talib steps to the front of the van to speak to one of his subordinates. Sikandar doesn’t see him move; with his head hung low he barely registers any movement. The Talib returns now, backtracking three steps. He waves his gun at Sikandar.

  ‘Take off your kameez,’ he orders.

  Sikandar can’t process any of the Talib’s thoughts. He doesn’t understand his secret language of us versus us, of what makes you part of them and what makes you their enemy.

  ‘Brother, I don’t . . .’

  ‘Don’t call me brother!’ the gaunt Talib shouts. He doesn’t move his hand off the Kalashnikov, not even to wipe the falling drizzle from his sunburned cheekbones. The rain hangs off him like glycerine.

  Sikandar gestures to Mina.

  ‘I can’t. Please.’

  The Talib wants to see his back, wants to check if he has the marks of Ashura on his flesh. They want to see if he whipped a sword across his should
er blades to commiserate with the pain the Holy Prophet’s family felt as they were massacred at Karbala.

  They want to know if he is one of the men who beat their palms across their chests, like Mina, until their skin is raw. If he is one of those who walk barefoot in processions across unswept streets, pricking their soles with shards of glass and thorns and still-lit cigarette butts.

  Sikandar flinches in anticipation of another blow and he begins, in his nervous desperation, to sob. He has no consideration for the mother whose infant is being strangled by its umbilical cord, whose life he has come to this savage wilderness to save, and at that moment, for that cluster of seconds, he can spare no thought for his wife, who will never be able to look at her husband again. Sikandar sobs only for himself, for what he fears is about to happen in the coming minutes when his faith is confirmed and then condemned.

  In one hour he has shamed himself more than months of Mina’s hysteria have done. More than his body has ever allowed him to express in grief or in sadness it has let out in fear. He can’t hold back. Sikandar’s tears only anger the commander.

  With the hand that doesn’t have its index finger poised on the Kalashnikov’s trigger, the Talib grabs Sikandar’s hair and pulls his head back, holding him against the driver’s seat. The gaunt Talib brings his face to within a centimetre of Sikandar’s. Sikandar can smell him; he can smell the earth and the rain on the Talib’s parched skin.

  ‘Kafir.’

  The Talib spits at him.